A New Republic of the Heart is a non-profit organization, a community of practitioners, the title of a book and series of courses and podcasts:
https://newrepublicoftheheart.org/community/
https://www.terrypatten.com/nrh/
https://newrepublicoftheheart.org/#special-section
https://newrepublicoftheheart.org/podcast/
A New Republic of the Heart is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization formed to bring system level change and to address the existential problems of our time.
A new Republic of the Heart is also an actively engaged community. The invitation on the website (https://newrepublicoftheheart.org/community/) states:
“If you understand what time it is on planet Earth, you know we need radical, whole-systems change. This will require a new level of human maturity. You are invited to support and join our serious, playful, experimental, joyful, transformational community. We are spiritual practitioners and change agents.”
Groups gather in dyads and “pods,” as well as in the large group and several “circles,” to engage in dialog and work together.
The many podcasts (https://newrepublicoftheheart.org/podcast/) are gathered in a series called “State of Emergence. There are (as of January 2022) 74 podcasts, starting in 2020, spanning topics such as racism, the I-Thou relationship with the Living Earth, breaking the curse of evil, and “becoming a good ancestor.”
Speakers being interviewed in this series are among the most dynamic thinkers and speakers of the current era. They include Francis Weller, Meg Wheatley, Michael Dowd, Paul Levy, Carolyn Baker, Connie Barlow, Thomas Hubl, Bill Plotkin.
There are also many blog posts, by a variety of members, to be found under https://newrepublicoftheheart.org/voices/
One of these begins: “You all know that with each passing year wildfires consume larger expanses of territory, the hurricane season starts earlier and causes yet more tragic loss, record shattering temperatures are constantly being recorded, and more species are declared extinct. Forever.
Have you ever wondered, perhaps lost sleep while wondering who is in charge? Who is allowing our Mother Earth, the only home we will ever know, to become so sickened that she soon may no longer be able to support us and all that would follow?
We are the Voices Blog Team of the New Republic of the Heart reading our favorite excerpts from A New Republic of the Heart: An Ethos for Revolutionaries by Terry Patten. We will be zeroing in on these perplexing questions in a two-part recital of selected passages from Chapter 1: Our Wicked Predicament and the Consensus Trance.
In our first segment, author Terry Patten summarized our faltering ecological systems whose trajectory points toward catastrophic collapse with horribly unimaginable implications for humanity. Then, he exposed the built in roadblocks which team up to impede our efforts to recognize and address this runaway crisis. In our second segment, Terry digs deeper to reveal how our perceptions and attitudes are, unbeknownst to us, corralled into a conformity sufficiently narrow to assure society’s cohesion and mutual understanding, but which cripple our ability to fend off new, unanticipated challenges.
A New Republic of the Heart also refers to Terry Patten’s 2018 book. This book is followed by a 2020 book describing what the community did, and experienced between 2018 and 2020.
- a) Terry Patten, A New Republic of the Heart, 2018, one review summarizes:
Recasting current problems as emergent opportunities, Terry Patten offers creative responses, practices, and conscious conversations for tackling the profound inner and outer work we must do to build an integral future.
In practical and personal terms, he discusses how we can all become active agents of a transformation of human civilization and why that is necessary to our continued survival.
Patten’s narrative focuses on two aspects of existence–our dynamic but fractured and threatened world, and our underlying wholeness and unity. Only by honoring both of these realities simultaneously can we make sustainable changes in ourselves, our communities, our body politic, and our planetary life-support system.
A New Republic of the Heart provides a comprehensive understanding and inspiring vision for “being the change” in a way that can address the most intractable problems of our time. Patten shows how we can come together in our communities for conversations that matter and describes new communities, enterprises, and forms of dialogue that integrate both inner personal growth work with outer awareness, activism, and service.
Between 2018 and the present time, The New Republic of the Heart has brought together people and communities to address our urgent global challenges by doing the inner work of personal transformation AND the outer work of civic engagement.
The final concluding statement (https://newrepublicoftheheart.org/about/) about the New Republic of the Heart is that “We are helping to co-create a new republic of the heart locally, regionally, nationally, and globally.”
- b) Terry Patten, Siobhan McClory, Kristin Nauth, Being the Change, 2020:
Terry Patten, Siobhan McClory, Kristin Nauth, Being the Change, 2020:
From January to December 2019, over 150 people from 13 countries engaged in a yearlong social experiment called Living in a New Republic of the Heart. Together our group made a radical commitment to learn to “be the change” that could catalyze the whole-systems transformation necessary to navigate humanity’s extreme civilizational crisis. That’s a lofty intention.
We knew we could only hope to succeed incompletely. But we would publish the results, and whatever we learned—both successes and failures—would be useful input for other groups attempting to be living laboratories of holistic transformation. We foresaw that a new field of inquiry was spontaneously emerging and that our experiment represented both an exemplar and an advancement of it. We call this new field “Intentional Cultural Evolution.”
People all over the world are seeking to awaken together, to cooperate in new ways that involve new depths of friendship, new agreements, new practices. Whole-systems transformation will require entirely new ways of being human, individually and together. We saw that this important new field will not advance primarily via abstract academic research, but rather via action-inquiry—learning by doing, iterating, and rapidly evolving best practices.
Our experiment and this book seek to contribute to this field in two ways: (1) By “being the change” ourselves—learning by doing; and (2) by sharing what we learn. This volume reports our best practices and learnings in a format designed to be useful to others. We deeply hope it may inspire and inform your own experiments in intentional cultural evolution.
